How do i read just the last line of a text file?

[Steven Bethard]

Andy Leszczynski wrote:
> Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:
>>    And to answer the question in the subject line:
>>
>> last_line = file(argv[1]).readlines()[-1]
>>
>>    Both of which assume "from sys import argv".
> 
> What if a file is long enough?

Huh?  You mean what if it's too big to fit in memory?  Then try this:

for last_line in file(argv[1]):
     pass

At the end of the for loop, last_line should be bound to the last line 
in the file.  (If there's a chance your file might not have any lines, 
you'll want to do some error checking...)

STeVe